


Legend Has It

by goldkirk



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: All Magic Comes With a Price, BAMF Tim Drake, Batfamily (DCU), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I borrow the Beldam and her powers from Neil Gaiman but the rest is all me baby, Magic, Magical Accidents, Magical Tim Drake, Protective Batfamily (DCU), Resurrected Jason Todd, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Tim Drake-centric, and does not fuck with fae, and that's on Tiny Tim being so empathetic he can bring the dead and inanimate to life oops?, ghost Martha and Thomas have some beef and also love family, in which the author is very Irish and very into magic, someone come protect this child from the Beldam will you, tim will learn not to as well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24905410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldkirk/pseuds/goldkirk
Summary: Tim gets very, very good at hiding. He gets even better at photography.The thing he gets best at?Talking to the ghosts.————Jason Todd stands tall on shaking legs, his arms full of another boy, thinner, with closed eyes and ghost-gray skin. Bloody hands, absolutely covered in dirt--so is Jason, now that Alfred thinks of it--”Alfie,” Jason croaks. “Alfie, help. I think he’s dying.””Oh Good Lord in Heaven,” Alfred chokes out, flings the door wide, and pulls them both in.—————In which Tim is magic, secrets are kept, prey is stalked, and the world might just be put a bit more to rights before the end.
Relationships: Tim Drake & Dick Grayson & Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne & Damian Wayne
Comments: 207
Kudos: 963





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> A fusion of a Coraline-inspired AU and Tim's-Family-Has-Hidden-Magic-Powers that I said I wouldn't write and fell down the rabbit hole of anyway. 
> 
> I KNOW I SAID I DIDN'T WANT TO WRITE IT BUT HERE WE GO, YEE HAW I GUESS

He’s alone, when it happens.

Small bare feet hit sun-warmed cobblestone as Tim runs down one of the garden paths behind his house, running alone, running just for the feel of the moving air, and he smiles with closed eyes and toes that dig into the crevices between old stones with every step. 

He looks around again, hangs a left past a peony bush, and almost tumbles to a halt. 

There’s a bird, on the ground. A tiny one. One of its wings is at a wrong angle, he can tell, and maybe a leg, too, and--it looks like its eyes are closed, is it--

Tim’s on his knees and reaching one small hand out to touch it, brushing its soft feathers with the lightest touch he can manage. There’s no response. The small body is still, cold, and stiff under his fingers, no matter what he does to try to coax it awake. He slumps down where he sits, hands falling to rest against the cobblestone, pressing down, and all he can think is _It’s not fair._

It’s not fair that such a tiny bird has to die all alone in a garden. What was it doing? Does it have a family? Is it just a kid bird, still growing up? Was it on a long journey? Why did it have to--

Tim takes a breath. It doesn’t feel right, leaving the delicate little bird to rest in the middle of the path to be stepped on or dragged off by an opportunistic predator. It deserves a burial. He can manage that, at least--he knows how, he buried his goldfish from the school carnival last year, out behind the tool shed. 

Tim leans forward and scoops the bird up in his two small hands, cradling it with care. He looks down, for a moment, feeling a surge of sadness and affection and a small wish that he could have helped, could have found the bird sooner. 

A wing twitches. 

Tim almost drops the bird right then and there. But he catches his reaction just in time, and as he lifts his cupped hands up to eye level, staring, staring, staring, the little bird drags its wings in, opens its eyes, and gathers itself up to stand on his left palm, lifts its beak up to look him in the face. 

It blinks once, and greets him with a beautiful, high chirp. 

Tim _wheezes_.

The bird stares for another long moment, twitters something fast and happy and loud, and then launches off his hands into the air and wings it toward the trees. He loses sight of it in seconds. 

Tim kneels on the warm cobblestone until his knees have divots that will take ages to smooth out, staring down at his hands with a combination of disbelief and horror and a very little bit of joy. 

The bird was dead. 

He knows it. He _knows_ it. There’s no other explanation, Tim checked, he’s seen dead birds before, it was _distinctly not alive._

The bird...is now alive. 

Unless Tim hallucinated the whole thing, the bird definitely flew off. From his own hands. It woke up in _his hands._

Does this make him a necromancer? Tim shudders. Necromancers are--they’re supposed to be evil, they raise the dead and usually use them for nefarious purposes in stories. He’s never heard of them being real before, or magic being real, which is--a problem. But he _did_ just resurrect an entire bird, somehow, so Tim’s fairly willing to suspend his usual disbelief for today. 

Necromancers are--they’re a bad kind of magic, forbidden and dark and evil. But what just happened...whatever Tim did, somehow...it didn’t feel evil. 

It didn’t feel like much of anything, actually. Maybe it wasn’t him at all? Maybe...maybe he got it wrong. He hasn’t seen a _lot_ of dead birds, after all, maybe he just--missed it, and the bird wasn’t hurt as badly as it had seemed. It was possible. 

Tim scrambled to his feet, trying to push the incident out of his mind for now. He could ask his parents, maybe, when they came home from their trip in a few weeks. They tended to know almost everything. This kind of thing probably happened all the time. 

It was probably not him at all. Just a coincidence. That was all. 

Two weeks and eighteen resurrected insects, one resurrected squirrel, and one dog in a hit-and-run brought back from death that Tim had witnessed for sure, and it...it’s definitely Tim. He can’t deny it anymore. His own small hands are mysteries now, his days full of wondering what he’ll accidentally resurrect next--a rose bush? A person? He certainly doesn’t know. 

He doesn’t think people would be happy to know about his new ability, either. He’s been reading about it, when he can. Googling everything he can find about necromancy and resurrections and cheating death. It’s not very good. 

Tim doesn’t _mean_ to. It just _happens_. He doesn’t know how to stop.

So he’s going to have to hide. Seven years old, he digs out a notebook and comes up with a plan. 

  1. Look before touching anything when other people are around. 
  2. Don’t offer to clean up dead bugs at school anymore.
  3. Don’t tell Mrs. Mac.
  4. No pets. Can’t risk it. 
  5. Just avoid _anything_ dead.
  6. Stop eating meat. There’s no way it’s worth the risk. (He doesn’t think he can reanimate a chicken from a nightly dinner, or some McNuggets, but...a couple weeks ago, he didn’t think he could reanimate anything at all. So he’s not very inclined to leave it to chance, right now.)
  7. Don’t tell Mother or Father when they return.
  8. No going to cemeteries--that just sounds like a terrible idea.
  9. Start wearing boots and long socks when in the woods, so any accidental carcass-brushing doesn’t...resurrect a fox or squirrel or rabbit that wants to bite him, or something.
  10. Find someone who has answers. 



Tim puts the marker down after scribbling number ten, and stares at it for a minute. That sounds like a tall order. But he does live in Gotham, and you never know what shops you’ll find or people you’ll meet in this city, if you don’t stick to the most well-trodden sidewalks. He’s good at slipping away sometimes, when his parents are distracted.

He’ll work on it. He’s got time, probably. As long as this doesn’t get...worse. 

And meanwhile, he’s got parents coming home, and a spelling test tomorrow, and if his nose is correct, Mrs. Mac’s homemade brownies fresh out of the oven. The list and his newfound necromancy can wait. 

He’ll figure it out, eventually. He will.

He has to.


	2. get you gone now, have some fun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim is adjusting. He meets his first ghost, finds some old secrets, and maybe, possibly, gets to go on an adventure that will take him someplace nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from Come Along by Cosmo Sheldrake. 
> 
> Poor Tim :')

Tim is nine years old when he realizes, _Oh my god._

_Oh my god,_ staring at the TV screen with wide eyes, homework forgotten in his lap. _Robin is Richard Grayson. Robin is Dick. And that means--that means--Batman is Bruce Wayne._

Tim frowns, shoves his workbook and pencil off to the side and slides off the couch onto the floor, onto his hands and knees, scrambles till he’s within inches of the screen. 

It can’t be. It is. He just saw the proof, right there, on live TV--

Tim snatches the remote and rewinds the Tivo to watch the right segment, again and again and again. 

It is. He’s _right_. There are only three people in the world who could do that quadruple somersault. He knows. 

Two of them are dead. They show up in his dreams at least once a week, still, like they have ever since he was four years old at the circus and met a boy who hugged him like a friend and promised to show Tim a flip, special just for him, and was smiling wide before his parents’ rope snapped and they fell down to their--

Tim slams his fingers against the TV’s power button, and then spends a long time staring at his own blank face in the dark screen. 

Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne. It’s been them, this whole time. His heroes, the ones he’s been watching, daydreaming about--

He knew there had to be a reason Bruce Wayne glowed two different colors, nestled within each other. He knew it. And Dick--he’s so bright. Brighter than almost any other person Tim’s ever seen. 

He has to go out there. He has to see Batman and Robin in person, not just in a picture or on a screen. He has to see their colors himself, double check that it’s true. Then he’ll know, for sure. He just needs to  _ check _ . 

* * *

It’s not hard to sneak out of the empty house with his dark clothes and knowledge of bus schedules and lack of supervision. He’s just going out to see them, just to take a few photos--he needs the practice, anyway, and since he’ll already be out, he might as well see what he can shoot. 

One night turns to two. Two nights turn to many. 

Tim gets very, very good at hiding. He gets even better at photography. 

The thing he gets best at? 

Talking to the ghosts.

* * *

Tim doesn’t speak much, as a general rule. It’s not that he can’t, it’s just that--adults don’t tend to  _ listen _ . Tim tries, he does, but every time he speaks with his parents, or teachers, or Mrs. Mac, or anyone, really, his words just...don’t want to come, very well. For everything that matters, Tim struggles to find what word he’s reaching for, the right words in the right order that will summarize with exact precision what he’s trying to say. 

It takes him time, to choose his words so carefully. Most people, they don’t want to listen that much. After a couple of seconds of his slow sentences, most people tend to be off in their own heads, already thinking of what they want to say, and Tim’s given up trying to make that any different. 

It’s okay. He has the ghosts, after all. He doesn’t get to practice talking with normal people, which is probably why he’s so bad at it. But with the ghosts--

With the ghosts, everything just flows better. He still feels the urge, the prickling need to be careful what he says, to make it  _ right _ . But it’s easier with the dead. Less pressure, or something--maybe because whatever he is, it’s closer to their plane of existence than his own. Or maybe it’s just because--who can they tell, if he’s slow or screws up a sentence, or starts over five times before finally finding the phrase that sounds right and strikes a chord like a deep, earthy bell somewhere deep in his bones. 

The first one he met was Martha. Two months after the bird incident. He’d been wandering barefoot in the grass, feeling it crinkle and poke the arches of his feet while little goosebumps danced up his legs in the fall air that wasn’t yet cold but wasn’t quite warm anymore, either. And he’d been looking at the cracked stone bench, next to the butterfly bushes his mom insisted on planting. And one moment, it was empty, and the next, there she was. Dress and beautiful hair and pearls and all. She had smiled at him, right away. Patted the seat next to her.

“Come join me,” she’d said, and even though he was ten feet away at least, and her voice was pitched low, he could hear her clear as anything. “Come join me,” she repeated, holding out a hand. “You look like you could use some company.”

Dead birds. Dead animals. Tim thinks he’s losing his mind. 

First he resurrects all kinds of living beings, no explanation, no warning. Okay. Sure. That’s fine, he’s managing, he’s--coping admirably, he thinks. Necromancy. Okay. Whatever. 

Now there’s a ghost in his backyard. Good grief. What next? A werewolf? His mom’s actually a witch? A fairy is gonna step out of the tree line and try to drag him off to Fae?

Somehow, he’s dropping to sit next to her on the old bench. Except it doesn’t look that old, anymore--the years of mold are gone, suddenly. It’s not new, but it’s clean, and the crack running through one side is half the size it had just been.

Tim thinks maybe it’s time to stop questioning things. For his own sanity. He needs to get really good at rolling with things, really quickly.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” the woman asks him, reaching out one translucent hand to try to brush stray hair behind his ear. He shivers as her fingers brush his skin, but--the hair moves. 

Tim stares. 

“Timothy,” he whispers. 

“What a strong name,” she says. “I’m Martha. I live at the house next door, usually, but the birds were talking the other day about someone new over here, someone young and alone, and I thought I’d come say hello, show you the ropes.” She frowns a little, then. “But you don’t look like a dead child to me. I think there’s been a bit of a mix-up.”

“Dead,” Tim echoes. 

“Yes,” says Martha. “Which you are most definitely not.”

“No,” Tim agrees. “Uh, I’m not. Dead, I mean. Definitely alive.”

“But you see me,” Martha murmurs. “They usually can’t. The living. Have you had any near death experiences recently?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hm. Any odd experiences, strange happenings--maybe a possession, or a new object that gives off strange vibes, anything like that?”

“I--” Tim starts, then stops. He’s blank, somehow, and yet feels full to bursting with words that he can never get out. 

Martha just watches patiently. Really watches, like she’s focused on him. Like she understands he just needs a little time.

“I think I’m wrong,” Tim gets out. “I’ve been resurrecting animals and that’s not supposed to happen. I don’t know how to stop.”

“Oh, baby,” Martha says, tugging him against her side, and he should be cold. And he is. But at the same time--at the same time, he leans right into it, shivering and curling in closer, because along with the icy touch there’s a sort of warmth, too, and Tim suddenly needs it more badly than he’s ever needed anything before in his life. 

“You’re so young,” Martha whispers, pressing her ghostly lips to his hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t know exactly what’s going on. But I’d like to listen, if you want to talk about it. Maybe we can figure it out together.”

“Together?” Tim asks. People in his life don’t do a whole lot of things together. 

“Yes,” she says, with a nod. “Together. You don’t deserve to be alone. And someone ought to keep an eye on you, what with the animal population around here, and also introduce you to the other local ghosts, considering that if you can see us now you’re bound to run into all of us sooner or later.”

“Oh,” Tim says, because he’s not sure what else he should say to all that.

“How about this,” Martha tells him. “I’ll tell you about my old rose garden, hm? And then you can tell me what your favorite flowers are over here, and we’ll go see them, and then if you want to, we can talk more about what’s been going on. But only if you want.”

“I--okay, I guess,” says Tim. “That sounds good. Are you like, a ghost fairy godmother?”

Martha’s laugh is the most beautiful laugh Tim’s ever heard, and for a few sweet seconds it fills the whole area around them while she throws her head back and shakes with the force of it. 

“A fairy godmother,” she says, wiping one eye and grinning down at him. “Oh, Lord. Thomas’ll never let me hear the end of this one. No, sweetie, I’m just a lady who’s stuck here for a while longer. Perfectly ordinary. But it’s sweet of you to wonder that.”

Tim has no idea what’s happening anymore. He really doesn’t. Somehow, he’s also starting to care less and less. It’s not like any of this has been feeling particularly bad, or even scary. Just odd. 

Tim can handle odd.

“We have roses too,” he tells her, slowly. “But my favorites are the peonies, over on the other side.”

“Let’s go see them, then,” Martha says. “And while we walk, I’ll tell you about my roses, and the man who’s been taking care of them since I died. He and I used to argue for hours over fertilizer, let me tell you.”

She holds one hand out, expectantly, and Tim stares at it for a moment, trying to figure out what she’s doing. And then he realizes. 

He slowly reaches one of his own much smaller hands out, up, and slips his fingers around hers. They nestle together like a jigsaw puzzle, and Tim’s hand gets cold but his heart--his heart blooms. 

So yeah. Martha was the first. And probably the one he loves best. But she definitely wasn’t the  _ last _ .

* * *

So Tim resurrects animals, sometimes on accident, sometimes on purpose, always in secret.

He talks to ghosts. A lot of ghosts. So many ghosts, oh my god, he cannot believe how many ghosts. Most of them are pretty cool. A few of them aren’t. 

He  _ sees  _ things, more and more. He’s very good at seeing things. And finding things. Where Tim looks, things seem to just--light up. Not everything, and not even most things, but sometimes ordinary places will shine like bonfires, or a book will glow in a bookshelf, or certain people will shine with colors of the rainbow, and Tim just knows, somehow, that there’s something  _ more _ . Whatever  _ more  _ means. 

He follows Batman and Robin, most nights. In secret, silent, disguised and hidden, of course. He takes his photos and watches their own lights shining from under their uniforms. He checks in with some of the ghosts he’s friends with on their various patrol routes, and catches up on the latest gossip and tips. 

He doesn’t tell anyone any of this at all. It’s not like his parents are ever around much, anyway, for him to tell, but still. He knows how to keep a secret. 

He still doesn’t talk much. But he talks more than he did, and when he does, it’s much smoother. He has Martha and her endless patience and whoever her son was, once upon a time before she kicked it, to thank for that. 

Tim even has some younger ghost friends he plays with, sometimes, in the trees, or in his bedroom--Brent and Luis both figured out how to actually hold game controllers, and Tim’s pretty pleased that he’s one of the only people in the world who can say he’s had Mario Kart tournaments with literal ghosts. 

No one needs to know that the ghosts tend to kick his butt at it. It’s bad enough that they tell the rest of the ghost community. Tim can only handle so many roasts, and definitely not roasting from two planes of existence all at once. 

So yeah. It’s not bad, really. His life is weird. He still doesn’t know what’s going on. But he’s doing okay. It’s okay. 

He’s okay. 

* * *

Tim brings back a hawk, he brings back some baby mice for a grateful mama, he resurrects a squirrel something killed overnight, he even brings back a turtle who strangled to death in a tangle of garbage by the pond. 

And then he brings back a spider in the hallway, that his mom stepped on, and failed to notice that she’d come back to get something she’d left behind.

In two seconds flat, Tim finds his upper arm gripped so tight it aches, and his back collides with the old wallpaper lining the hallway, his head thunking against drywall. His mother’s face is twisted in fear, in anger, and it’s inches from his own. 

But, he notices, she doesn’t look  _ surprised _ . 

“Timothy Jackson Drake,” she shouts at him, and Tim wonders if his father can hear from out front, with how loud she is. “Never do that again. Never. We do not do things like that here. You can never let anyone know.”

Does she--is she implying that she knows? That this has happened before, to more than just him? Is he not the only one--

Her hand slaps him on the cheek, and his attention snaps back to her.

“Do you understand,” she snarls. 

“Yes, Mother,” he gets out. 

She lets go of him, steps back. He doesn’t move. Her face turns into something more haunted, now, and she glances once down the hallway, towards the front entrance, before turning back and pinning him with a fierce look. 

“You do not see them,” she whispers. “You will not touch the dead, and there is nothing strange to see in the world. Do you understand.”

Tim swallows, forces himself to nod once.

“Yes, Mother,” he says. His palms press against the slick wallpaper.

She nods back at him, then sweeps away down the hall and out the door. He doesn’t move for several minutes after she’s gone, not until he’s totally sure their car has pulled away and they’re well down the drive to the main road. 

The spider, he notices, has remained by his foot, and when he looks down, he could almost swear that it lifted two legs and  _ waved _ . 

* * *

Tim tears the house apart. 

There’s no one here to be bothered by the mess, so long as he keeps it out of the main areas. Most of the actual stored items are tucked away in unused rooms anyway, so he spends four days going door by door, digging through drawers and closets and cabinets and shelves, and even a few hidden panels, finding every box and bin and bag and searching every inch. 

He finds photos, old junk, old artifacts, old canned food, old heirlooms. He finds millions of papers. He finds books. He finds two separate sets of woodcarving supplies, for some reason.

On the fifth day, he finds another wooden chest. This one--this one shines. 

Tim swallows. Then he reaches forward and clicks the latch open, lifts the lid, not sure what he’ll see, but this is it. It has to be. 

There’s an old-looking leather journal, nestled on top of what looks like a hodge-podge of items. It’s stuffed full of pasted-in papers, with wrinkled pages and all sorts of colors of ink and smelling like lavender and sandalwood and something else he doesn’t know. He picks it up like it’s an unexploded bomb, and tugs the strings till it falls open to the inside of the front cover, and the cursive written there. 

_ Property of Janet Dormer, of the line of daughters of Magee, sixteenth holder of the peridot adder. Book the third of her encounters with the Other and knowledge thereof, to be passed down as record to eldest daughter-- _

Tim slams the book shut, sets it down in the chest, and snaps the lid into place before falling back onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. 

A witch. His mom was a witch. Or magic. Or something. The sixteenth, at least, apparently. And it wasn’t--it wasn’t for his eyes. Apparently. 

If if was a line of daughters, if it was--if it was supposed to pass to the eldest of a family, why did it seem to have come to him?

What in the world was going on? Why would she hide this? From the world, he could understand. But from him? And what had happened in the hallway--the way she reacted--

Tim wants to ask her. Tim wants to email her, or call, forget encryption--but he knows he shouldn’t. There must be a reason. 

He can’t ask her. He can’t. She’ll probably bind him to silence forever, or something. She definitely wants to put it behind her, if how much she’s hidden the chest and how angry she got at him are any indications. 

Tim squeezes his eyes shut. 

He went looking. That’s on him. He wanted answers. 

As seems to becoming a pattern in his life, he didn’t find them. Instead, he’s only got more questions. 

More questions, a thousand questions, and never an answer, not for years now. He’s so tired. 

Tired and alone and lost and lonely. 

But he’s okay. He’s okay. He’s got his ghosts. He’s got Batman and Robin. He has school to keep him busy, doesn’t he?

Tim’s fine.

* * *

His mother told him not to, but Tim can’t help it. He still talks to the ghosts--even when he doesn’t search them out, he runs into them, they find him. Apparently, he glows too. They can see the people who glow much more clearly than the rest of the living. They can’t really tell him what it means, though.

Another mystery to add to the pile.

The more he tries to avoid any dead animals, the more he bumps dead flies at the bus stop, sees a cat hit by a car and has to step in, stumbles across a bird with a broken neck that flew into a window right in front of him. The more he resists, the worse it gets. So Tim gives up. He resurrects the ones that need it, instead of running away, and the whole thing seems to slow down some. 

Karma’s happy, or something. Whatever works. 

So he carries on, for months. He does his schoolwork and makes some friends and talks to the ghosts and helps the animals and when his parents are home for days or a week or two, he still doesn’t give any of it up. They come into his life, over and over, again and again whether he wants them or not. And he can’t just leave them there.

So Tim just gets good at not getting caught. 

* * *

But what he doesn’t know yet, what isn’t in any books he’s found at the library or any websites he’s stumbled upon, not even in the strangest forums he finds in the deepest corners of the internet, is that there are creatures in the dark that is deeper than the blackness in the back of his closet. There are creatures who bide their time in deep places, tangled, twisted pockets of nastiness, waiting and watching for opportunities. 

Opportunities like Tim. 

There’s a Beldam, is what he doesn’t know. There’s a Beldam who’s caught his scent. Tim’s ten. Just ten years old, quite independent, settled into whatever his new normal is, but.

Beldams hunt down sadness. Small beings, gray clouds over particularly bright souls, sad and curious and open and naive and lonely, is what they look for, and so, so sweetly, deliciously vulnerable--

A Beldam is hunting. Waiting, watching. Scenting her prey, in various dimensions. And Tim, right now…

Tim smells like a five course meal.

* * *

He finds the key on a Tuesday. Sees it on the wet grass of one of the school fields, after a night of rain that’s left the whole morning full of thick, soupy fog, and he sees it glint and picks it up. It looks off, to him--it glows, like some things do. He figures that’s probably why he managed to notice it at all. But it doesn’t glow any color he has a name for. Possibly not a color that exists in the English language at all, even. 

But right now he has six minutes until the next period, and since no one is in sight, he can’t tell if someone dropped it on accident. He tucks it in his pocket to try to figure out later.

And when it’s later, he’s wandering the halls of his house, listless. Because once again, his parents haven’t made it home for his birthday, his _tenth_ birthday, even after they said they would. There’s been not so much as a call, or a text, and Tim doesn’t need them, but--

But it’d be nice. To at least know they remembered. 

Something feels warm against his leg, when he turns a corner, and he suddenly remembers the key in his pocket. And in front of him, to his surprise--there’s a door. 

Well. There are a lot of doors in the hallway. But there’s one he doesn’t recognize, somehow. One he doesn’t really remember going into before. And oddly enough...it’s the exact same color as the key resting in his hand. 

Not painted, or wood, he means--if he unfocuses his eyes, and squints just right, opens up more to that side of him--it glows the same indescribably shade of iridescent  _ something  _ that the key has ever since he found it this morning. 

There’s a door. And a key. And if Tim’s learned anything in the past few years, it’s that there is a lot more in the world than people realize, and that coincidences are rare for people like him. 

He has a key. And they’re glowing so warmly. And it is his birthday, after all, and he has the time, so...maybe a bit of an adventure on this long, lonely evening would help. 

Maybe it’s the universe balancing out his disappointment somehow. Who knows. 

Tim lifts his shoulders, takes a few steps forward. He slides the key into the lock, and it’s a perfect fit all the way, the heavy iron weight of it so satisfying in his fingers, and he twists, and hears the click, and the door swings open to reveal a tunnel of soft silk, studded with stars, with warm air, with swirling colors--it’s beautiful. It’s magical. 

He feels like--he feels like it’s for him. 

Tim grins for the first time in days. This is the kind of birthday surprise he can get behind. As long as he wedges the door open with a nearby bookend, from the table down the hall--there. Just like that.

As long as he keeps the door open on this end, he should be fine. He pockets the key and steps forward to the edge of the doorway, lines up his toes with the very edge of the tunnel. 

Then he takes a deep breath, smiles one more time, and steps through. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DRINK WATER OR SOME JUICE OR WHATEVER YOU LIKE TO DRINK! You need it! Go do it right now if you can, okay. Eat if you haven't recently, even if it's just small. Take any meds you need right now. Relax your jaw and shoulders and neck, okay? Hang in there. You got this. 
> 
> I HOPE YOU'RE LIKING THIS SO FAR I'm sorry I haven't updated Hymn yet hfsjlklkdj IT'S COMING


	3. run, boy, run

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim has a Bad Time. But unexpected allies save the day. Sort of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from "Run Boy Run" by Woodkid
> 
>  **Content Warnings:** Brief mention of a needle a couple times, like a sewing needle, and one of those times it pierces skin.

He’s  _ happy  _ here. He’s happier than he’s ever been before, happier than he’s ever felt in his  _ life,  _ he didn’t know it was even  _ possible  _ to feel like this. Everything is so, so good. 

* * *

It was admittedly a bit of a shock when he reached the end of the tunnel, portal, whatever you want to call it, and stepped right into his own hallway all over again. And a bit more of a shock when he’d followed the smell of something good cooking to the normally dark kitchen and found his mother flying between the oven, the stove, the island, actually cooking. 

And he admits without shame the noise that came out of his throat when he asked,  _ Mom?,  _ and Janet had turned around with soft wispy flyaways, a warm smile, and enormous, pitch-black buttons where her eyes should have been. 

But that was before. 

Tim had rallied quickly, and realized--

_ Is this an alternate universe, _ he’d asked, dazed, after Janet--if she was Janet--had smiled even wider and come to hug him after she turned around, and gone so far as to say  _ you’re here at last, my baby boy, I’ve been waiting for so long! _

She hummed at his question and patted him on the shoulder, pushing him gently into one of the nearby chairs, and said, something like that.

Who are you, he’d asked. 

_ I’m your mother, dear heart, _ she’d replied, and pulled a batch of banana bread muffins out of the oven in one smooth motion. Tim’s mouth watered. 

_ You’re not my mother, _ he said, staring at the pan. _ My mother is out of the country. And doesn’t cook. And doesn’t have-- _

_ Buttons? _ Janet had finished for him, turning back around again with a grin and tapping one long, bright red nail against one of hers.

_...Buttons, _ Tim agreed.

_ Well of course I’m not her,  _ Janet said. _ I’m your Other Mother. Everyone has one.  _

And so it began. 

* * *

Janet--Other Janet--teaches Tim to do more than just talk to the ghosts, since there aren’t actually any here that he’s found so far. She tells him about the magic creatures he’s never noticed before until she points them out for the first time. She tells him about crystals and how he can use them to store away a little bit of his own light each day so he has extra if he needs it for something big. She even keeps those crystals safe for him, tucked somewhere he won’t lose them on accident. She teaches him about animals, more, the rules for resurrection, equivalent exchanges of energy, that the whole world has a price. 

Except her love, of course. She loves him so very, very much. 

Other Jack welcomes Tim every time the boy knocks on his study door. He plays tag with Tim in the garden, they wash up together for meals with Other Janet, they read books and talk about movies and go see the mountains, even, and Tim spares just a single thought for his father, back home, over in Turkey, he thinks, and wonders if--if--

It doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. Tim can stay here as long as he likes, with his Other Mother and Other Father and beautiful days and a real birthday cake with ten whole candles, and shells on the edges, and careful piping that reads  _ Happy Birthday, Tim!  _ with just the tiniest smudge on the curl of the second y where Tim had laughed too hard at a story and accidentally bumped Other Mother’s arm earlier. 

Tim has birthday cake and parents who want to talk to him and a world that’s just like his, in all the ways that matter, and he runs after Other Batman and Other Robin at night and takes the best photos of his entire life. And they save people even better than they did back in his old home. 

Tim eats Other Janet’s cooking and lets it fill him up, looks forward to how warm and sleepy and content he always feels after her real, home-cooked dishes. Looks forward to the times when he’s so sleepy afterwards that Other Jack scoops him up sometimes and carries him off for a nap or bedtime without Tim even having to learn to ask. 

No one has carried Tim to bed in a long, long time. 

He’s got good parents, now, and he can’t believe he didn’t realize he didn’t have them before. Having this, now, these things, this life, this happy dream, here--Tim tells Other Mother that he never wants it to end. 

_ I’m so glad, _ she tells him. Serves him a second slice of rich pudding cake, and he sleepily picks up his fork and takes another bite, humming with contentment. 

_ I’ve waited so long to get to have you here, _ she says, stroking his hair with long fingers and sharp nails and a caress of his cheekbone.  _ You don’t have to go back. You can stay here with us forever. We want you. You’re perfect, Timothy. My dear one. _

Tim can’t even describe what it feels like, to hear those words, from her mouth, in this kind of place.

He’s wanted. He’s  _ wanted _ . She wants him. 

_ Good,  _ he mumbles, slumping in his seat, eyes already at half mast. 

_ There’s just one thing you have to do, _ Janet says. And then you can stay here forever, just like the rest of us. 

_ What is it, _ he asks, and Other Father is stepping closer, ready to carry Tim off to bed the second Other Mother says so.

Other Mother pulls a small box out of some pocket Tim didn’t notice before, and slides it across the space between them, and smiles. 

He opens the wooden lid, stares down at the two black circles nestled against white satin, and something--something somewhere deep, deep inside his brain makes one small, quiet attempt at an alarm bell. The rest of him is too warm and sleepy to light the rest of the beacons of Minas Tirith, and the alarm remains nothing more than a small niggle, just a tiny bit of discomfort. 

_ You just need to join us properly, _ Other Mother murmurs, leaning forward till she’s just inches away from his face.  _ You just need to let me sew in your buttons, baby. They’ve been waiting for you for a long, long time. I hand-picked them for you myself. _

Tim stares hazily at the buttons, seeing them start to flicker with colors, as she explains she can make them any color he wants, reaches for the spool of thread nestled between them, smiles and moves to thread a needle--and Tim says--Tim says--

_ Wait,  _ Tim slurs. Other Janet freezes, and the smile slides off her face like something slimy slithering down a rock. 

_ I just--I’m tired, tonight, _ Tim tries. _ I do want to stay, I do, but--could I sleep first, and think about it? I want to make sure I pick the right color, and--and spend a day or two with my old eyes before I say goodbye all of a sudden. Is that-- _

Other Mother stares at him with her button eyes that he can’t read, and he’s much more aware of Other Father inches behind him than he was a few minutes ago. 

Tim swallows. 

_ Is that okay? _ he asks, in a very small voice. 

Other Mother smiles again, but there’s something--a little sharper, about it this time, he thinks, something with an edge, because he knows Janet Drake’s faces back home and he knows that this one means he’s done something wrong, but not quite wrong enough to require correction in front of  _ company _ . 

_ Of course, _ she tells him, though.  _ That’s perfectly understandable. Let your father take you up to bed, now, and sleep well, Timothy. You’ll need your rest, you’re a growing boy with lots of energy to replenish.  _

_ Yes, mother,  _ he says, limp in Other Father’s arms as they turn towards the door. 

For just a brief second, he could almost swear he sees a many-legged shadow flicker past on the dining room walls. But then he blinks, and turns his head, and if there was anything there at all, it’s already gone. 

* * *

That night there are the rocket ships flying through his bedroom air as usual, twinkling their little trails of sparks, and the fireflies at the edges. And there are the rats, in all the shadows, with their glowing red eyes like laser pointers, scratching and scraping and hissing quietly under his dresser, his bed, by the baseboard, within his walls. Tim sleeps on with a frown. 

That night there is the sleepy haze of Other Mother’s comfort food, and the tiny bit of his mind that shouted danger, danger, you have to run, and a nagging question of where are all the ghosts, he thought he’d meet them by now, and if Batman and Robin were here, too, just like home--

Why do they not shine like suns?

Tim jerks awake out of his half-doze and sits up, over-thick duvet bunching under his arms and around his waist, damp with his sweat, and he yanks his hands up over his ears trying to block out the sound of the rats, the scratching and the whispering and the rats rats rats, he doesn’t even  _ like  _ rats--why are they in his room--

How did he not notice. How did he not notice that Other Batman and Other Robin don’t glow. This whole time, he never noticed, never saw...because he never looked. 

Tim stops breathing. He fights against the cottony fog in his head that suddenly feels anything but warm and comforting now, and he thinks,  _ what have I not seen.  _

“Get out,” Tim whispers, so hoarse it’s almost inaudible. He glares at the glowing eyes he can see in the darkness, starts waving his arms in jerky motions. “Get out,” he repeats, stronger. “Get out, get out, _ get out!” _

The hissing is louder, and Tim huddles in the center of his too-soft mattress while the awful, wheezing, high-pitched voices rise up around him again, how did he never notice how horrible they are--

_ We have eyes and we have nerveses,  _

_ We have tails and we have teeth. _

_ You will get what you deserveses,  _

_ When we rise from underneath. _

Tim chokes on his breath and flings off the duvet. He stands on the bed on shaking legs, fighting the haze, fighting his vague terror, and forces himself to keep his eyes open and keep that extra sort-of-sense online and stare around his room and  _ look _ . 

It’s all--it’s all--

Tim’s on his bare feet, sprinting, flying, fleeing, his sweaty hair stinging as it slaps into his eyes, he’s gasping, heaving for air, and behind him there’s the sound of snicking, clicking, clacking--

Something metal, something insect, something fast and large and laughing--

Tim sprints down the hallways, the fake hallways, the tangled, ugly messes of rotted wood and draped moldy fabric and a hundred thousand things that smell like death and don’t glow, nothing glows at all, here, it sucks and sucks and sucks.

He sprints and he gasps and behind him he hears the rushing monster, finally, after all this time, when he was blind--blind as he would have been if the buttons had already been installed, isn’t that a joke--

“Don’t run from your mother, Timothy,” he hears, in the voice that is nothing like his mother’s, after all. 

(But isn’t that what he  _ wanted _ . Isn’t that why he  _ fell _ .)

“I love you,” the monster sing-songs. “I love you  _ so much. _ Come let me show you how much I love you--everything is so much clearer with nice, simple buttons instead of pesky, nasty eyes.”

* * *

Tim tries, at least. He hopes it counts. Matters, somehow. That he tried to run. He did.

He made it partway through, before Other Mother started shifting reality too much and he found himself sliding down strands of a web, running straight off the edge of a Gotham roof, and he still kept running, but even Tim with his sight couldn’t outrun Other Batman and Other Robin. 

He escapes one time before Other Robin pins him down, with black empty buttons and no grin or snappy words on his lips. Tim stares up with watering eyes as his body aches and his head bleeds and Other Mother raises a threaded needle, while Other Robin pins him down, while Other Batman watches from the side, face blank, head empty, soul--soul not there at all, is it, never was, not one second of all these days and nights--

* * *

Tim almost wishes he didn’t remember, tonight, to look for the first time in too long, wishes that he didn’t realize that everyone here, Other Father and Other Batman and Other Robin and all the other Others he’s met--everyone is empty. 

There are no colors. Not in anyone. Not even just one or two. They’re just  _ sacks, _ husks, the opposite of alive, and not even having the good grace to be dead, because they never were real in the first place, not at all.

* * *

Tim’s pinned under Other Robin’s weight, and Other Batman’s off to the side, silently watching, mouth sewn shut and button eyes looking pained, somehow, under the spots where the cowl’s been turned into tattered rags, and Tim looks up at Other Robin, Robin, a Robin he believed in, a Robin he loved.

He looks up at his Robin that he followed and admired and was so proud of, this whole time, and he looks at Other Robin who is sand and cloth and buttons for eyes and nothing inside him but black, black black, the Beldam’s tool of the moment, the one she knows will hurt Tim the most, and Tim is so sorry for him. And for Batman. And for everyone else in this horrible nightmare world of a spiderweb, everyone brought to not-life just to serve the Beldam whether they want to or not, whether they agree or not, because in the end, Batman had tried to stop, hadn’t he, Tim could  _ swear  _ it. 

Everyone brought to not-life here for nothing but pain, all because of Tim--it’s not their faults Tim was stupid, that they were brought into a cursed half-life as nothing but puppets to feel and cause pain--

* * *

Tim looks up as Other Robin stares down, black and buttoned and empty all over, and he’s sad and he’s  _ sorry  _ and he loves them all  _ so much  _ that he feels something  _ snap _ . 

And something funny happens, then. 

* * *

Robin and Batman--they come to  _ life _ .

* * *

The needle has pierced in and out of the skin above Tim’s left eye, burning, jabbing, punching, and he’s squeezed his eyes shut with ragged breaths and just a vague hope that it won’t hurt too much, in the end, which is coming rather a lot sooner than he’d hoped.

But there’s a gasp, suddenly, and then a very loud thud, and the sound of a lot of metal clattering together all at once. And then suddenly the needle has slid right back out the way it came. 

Tim snaps his eyes open, and he’s--he’s looking up at Robin’s teal eyes, his real eyes, eyes that Tim has seen at galas and school and on newspaper stands, and Robin’s mask is still missing, but his eyes--he has eyes--

And Batman, he’s got all his skin back where it belongs, not sagging all over anymore like melted candle wax, and his eyes are so, so ice blue, it almost hurts--

“Up,” hisses Robin, frantic and rushed, reaching out with his gloved hands and yanking Tim up before he can even say a word. “She’s only down for a moment. She’s coming, she’s coming, we have to get you  _ out.” _

* * *

They run and they dodge and Tim hears the rats, hears Other Mother and the sound of dying puppets and horrible laughter and horrible screeching, feels his heart beating out of his ribs. 

They run, Robin and Batman and Tim, all in a little unit, linked together, ducking and dodging and leaping. And they fight Her, they fight like the cornered animals they are, for life and for freedom and for a chance at _ not this hell, _ and  _ there’s the door.  _

There’s the door, but it’s too far--

Robin locks eyes with Tim for just a moment, while the web shakes and shudders beneath them, both of them clinging for dear life. And Jason Todd smiles a very small, very human smile, shouts _ thank you  _ over the ringing chaos of Other Mother’s screeches as she comes one strand nearer, then nods with a glance over Tim’s shoulder. 

And then he flings himself, screaming like a banshee, straight at the Other Mother’s head. 

Tim’s swept up the next second into warm arms, like a child, hears a gravelly, whispered run, and then there’s a grunt and he’s hurtling towards the door, into the moldy, rotting tunnel full of cobwebs, sliding sliding sliding falling until he crashes out the other side, filthy and panting and slamming into the opposite hallway wall. 

The door slams itself shut, and he scrambles on all fours to reach its knob, to jam the key in the lock and turn so hard with his hands and his swirling, screaming extra sense that the key snaps at the handle. 

And suddenly it all vanishes, even the key in Tim’s fingers, and he falls over against the wall, sick and panting and unsure what time it is, what day it is, how long it’s been and how much of that was real, even though he knows the answer is all of it. 

He thinks, _she used them,_ _she knew they were my heroes and she used them, and they couldn’t even fight._ And then he thinks, _I brought them to life, I didn’t know I could do that, I brought them--I think I brought them to life, and they just sacrificed themselves, and they didn’t get the chance to live--_

Tim thinks, _ I killed them. I killed them I killed them I killed them. _ And he tips over onto his side on the hallway floor, takes in a shuddering, gasping breath, and begins to finally sob.

* * *

Tim gets the worst fever of his entire life after that, alone in the Drake estate with ripped, filthy clothes and dried blood by his eyebrow, and he drags himself to bed alone and shakes violently on top of the pristine duvet. 

He thinks,  _ I killed them, _ he thinks,  _ I was happy,  _ he thinks  _ I should never have gone, I should have listened to Mother, I should have stopped it all that day and never touched any of the things again, I can’t do this, I can’t, not ever again--I have to stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it STOP-- _

Martha flies through the wall of his bedroom, with Thomas just a half-second behind, and they kneel beside Tim, speaking, pleading, trying to cool him as best they can with their icy hands and ask again and again, what happened, what happened, Timmy, where were you, no one could feel you at all for a few hours, Timmy, where are you hurt--

He doesn’t open his eyes, never answers, never sees them that night. 

They sit vigil anyway, curled around him, one on each side, trying to help the only way they can. Even though he’s not their son, even though he’s not one of them, they can at least do this much and try to make sure he keeps breathing through the night. 

* * *

_Make it stop,_ he mumbles, over and over and over in his fever haze, until he finally falls asleep after sunrise starts to lighten the air at the very edges of his curtains. 

* * *

Timothy Jackson Drake, age ten years, parents overseas, homework not quite done, wakes up the next morning a perfectly ordinary boy. He has no memory of a key or a door or a dead bird in the garden, and he follows Batman and Robin and he turns in his homework on time and when things flicker, some days, at the corner of his sight, he tells himself it’s just the light playing tricks on him, that’s all, and goes on that way for the better part of the next few years. 

And then Batman vanishes. And Robin vanishes. And the news says that Jason Todd, second son of famous billionaire Bruce Wayne, was killed this week in a tragic explosion over in Ethiopia, so tragic, how terribly, terribly sad. 

* * *

Tim goes to bed grieving, every night before the funeral. He doesn’t sleep at all on the day itself. And then for two nights afterward, he cries himself to sleep and doesn’t dream much while he lies curled up under an old quilt in the center of his just-right bed. 

Until his self-made blockade slips, just a fraction, while he’s too deep in sleep, just enough to let his soul say oh, hello, there’s someone here, I think I know you--I think I need to hear--

A ghost is in his room for the fourth day in a row, since Martha brought him there and told him to wait. And Tim’s dimmed-down glow flares back up, at last, and the ghost stands from where he’d curled up by the wall and comes over to join Tim on the bed, watching him breathe slow in his sleep. 

“Tim?” the ghost asks, hesitantly. “You don’t know me, but--well, I guess you do know me, kind of, which is really weird, by the way, you’re such a little stalker--but, um. Martha said you’re a good kid, and you do a lot of good for people like us, and that I could trust you, and that I ought to tell you thanks for caring all these years, so--so here I am. I guess.” He takes a breath, then slowly reaches out one hand, and hovers it just above Tim’s heart, the brightest glowing spot in the center of his chest. 

“Tim,” the ghost says. “Please. I really need your help.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drink eat take your meds be punk hug yourself and KNOW THAT YOU ARE LOVED OKAY <3


	4. and i've got hope in my hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tim does a THING, and a LOT OF THINGS HAPPEN while simultaneously NOTHING HAPPENS AT ALL. Bruce is roasted. Jason is wonderful. And Tim sleeps through, like, the whole darn thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI SORRY IN ADVANCE FOR MAKING YOU YELL A LOT PROBABLY I promise you will get a kick out of this chapter!!!
> 
> Chapter title is from "Keep Me Warm" by Tom Rosenthal
> 
>  **EDIT August 2020: hello hi I know I’ve been gone a long time, sorry, I’ve been in the hospital and stuff. This is finished as is and I’m working on the next part of the series so stay tuned!** 👀

A boy walks over a field, over a stone wall, in thin shorts and bare feet while grass perks up in the darkness every place he steps, and the boy stares ahead at nothing and everything in the world at once. 

His eyes glow gold. And then they close. 

He walks in an unbroken line over every uneven patch of ground and every manicured acre of grass until he finally stops in front of fresh earth, a pile of fresh earth next to two stones, and the boy--

The boy with closed eyes, the boy with cold arms, the boy in pajamas and bedhead and lips murmuring reassurances and promises to no one, into thin air--

He kneels on the ground and starts to dig. 

* * *

His nails bleed, his fingers are bruised to the joints, and he’s up to his head in loamy earth, but he stands on a coffin as birds slowly start to chirp over at the edge of the trees. His eyes are closed, still, while his battered hands find the catches, open up the top half. 

While dirt tumbles down in a baptism over his forehead, over his fingers, and he kneels with all the reverence of a priest in a cathedral on the cold, dirt-covered smooth surface, and one bruised, bleeding hand reaches down, slowly, towards a pale cheek--cold and still and familiar from nights and nights and nights of hiding on rooftops, in alleys, behind benches, watching that same cheekbone curl and shake with laughter under a domino mask, and the boy stretches an inch further, with that trembling hand, touches skin, while goosebumps rise on both shoulders, around his chest, on one side of his ribcage, and he touches skin--

And the boy in the coffin gasps, chokes all at once--sucks in a breath, quiet and ragged, and his eyes fly open, teal and wide and reflecting, for a moment, the rapidly fading stars. 

* * *

There’s a knock on the Manor door, shortly after, as the sun is just beginning to think about lighting up the eastern sky. And then a second knock, and a third, and it’s turned into more of a panicked banging, really, and Alfred Pennyworth hurries for it with a furrowed brow. 

He has his shotgun, because it is the _back_ door, and no one--no one uses that door, anymore, except for him, when he goes out to trim the roses. Not since--

Well. Not since they all know when.

He flicks the light on and opens the door, just as the first line of sky turns sapphire over the tree line behind the Manor. And he looks, for a moment, and then looks again, mouth open and shotgun dropping halfway to the floor, because standing in front of him-- _standing in front of him,_ flushed and shaking and very much _alive--_

Jason Todd stands tall on shaking legs, his arms full of another boy, thinner, with closed eyes and ghost-gray skin. Bloody hands, absolutely covered in dirt--so is Jason, now that Alfred thinks of it--

“Alfie,” Jason croaks. “Alfie, help. I think he’s dying.”

“Oh Good Lord in Heaven,” Alfred chokes out, flings the door wide, and pulls them both in. 

* * *

Five minutes, a frantic shout for Bruce, an emergency button signal to the Watchtower, and a quick game of snatch-a-teenager-and-run later, Alfred and Jason are in the elevator on their way down while Bruce skips the last four steps to the cave floor in a flying leap and skids on bare feet before sprinting the rest of the way to the med bay. 

His practiced hands fly through vitals checks on both boys, then hand Alfred supplies as he tries to stabilize the unconscious, unfamiliar boy who lies motionless and pale as a ghost between them. And his right hand never once leaves Jason’s shoulder, while his boy, his son, sits clutching the edge of a once-familiar gurney and shakes. 

“Bruce,” Jason gets out, and Bruce’s eyes don’t leave his face, can’t leave his face. “Bruce. _Dad.”_

“Jason,” Bruce whispers. 

“Dad,” Jason repeats, stronger this time, as he straightens a little, and glances to the side for the hundredth time. “Um. I don’t know how to make this any less crazy for you, but--but. Grandma says. You need to call Constantine.” 

Bruce’s blood turns to ice. 

“And,” Jason adds, head whipping to the other side, looking alarmed, “Fuck, oh, shit, Grandpa says you need to give Tim some--what? What do you mean--” Jason narrows his eyes, then goes on. “Okay! Okay, fine, I got it, I’ll tell him--”

Beside them the heart monitor suddenly screams. 

“Bloody hell,” snarls Alfred, and he whirls for the crash cart in the corner. 

“Grandpa says never mind,” Jason croaks. “Oh my god.”

* * *

They get Tim back and lose him again twice before death finally decides to give up for the day. 

Bruce is on the second gurney with Jason on his lap and wrapped up in his arms tightly, and the other boy is finally resting on the first gurney, breathing steady and slowly regaining normal color. 

Alfred keeps two fingers on the boy’s neck and slumps down at last on the nearby rolling stool.

“Well,” he says. “That does it, I hope. Pardon my French, one last time, Master Bruce, while I say--bloody hell.”

“Agreed,” Bruce murmurs, squeezing Jason for a moment, and then he suddenly fully realizes what his son has said, what his son has told him in the past several minutes, that he’d blocked out when the alarm first went off--

“Jason,” Bruce says. So very, very calm. “I love you. First of all. You should know that. I love you so much, and I don’t care that you ran off, and I am so glad you’re back with us.”

“I love you too,” Jason says, and sniffs hard. Bruce can’t even be mad when the boy wipes his nose right on Bruce’s sleeve, just like the old days. 

“But,” Bruce says, even more calmly, now. “Jason.”

Jason tenses, just a little, and then slumps further down in Bruce’s arms. “Yeah,” he whispers.

“Is there. Anything you need to tell me.” Bruce pauses. “About...about what you’re seeing.”

Jason sighs. Then he wiggles around side to side against Bruce’s hold until it loosens enough for Jason to push himself up and turn to face Bruce. He glances at Alfred, at Tim, and then locks eyes with his dad again. 

“Grandma--Grandma says,” he starts, hesitantly. “Grandma says to tell you hello. And she loves you very much, both of you, and that--” Jason’s face twists up in the way that only teenage boys can manage, and he looks over about a foot and a half to the left. “Do I have to? Is that really--”

There’s a pause for several seconds while Bruce and Alfred both watch Jason go on a face journey before their eyes, and then Jason _sighs_. 

“She also says,” he grumbles, glancing pointedly in the same direction as before, before staring up at Bruce, “that if you wear that ratty underwear under one more suit on gala nights, she’s going to finally figure out how to do more than nudge physical objects here and there just to manifest a corporeal form and scold you herself.” He closes his eyes. “She says, and I quote, ‘What is the one rule I taught you about getting dressed each day, Bruce? The one rule handed down for generations from my mother to me, and me to you. What was the rule, Bruce.’”

Bruce _gapes_. 

Jason opens one eye, a little, peeking up. 

“That wasn’t a rhetorical question,” he whispers. “She’s tapping her foot. Please answer her quick, Grandpa is laughing so hard it’s hurting my ears.”

“Mom?” Bruce whispers, then, turning a little, trying desperately to find the spot Jason keeps looking towards, locking eyes with Alfred who looks similarly shell-shocked, and then finally turning back to Jason, to his child, to his son. 

“Um, yeah,” Jason says, and scratches the back of his neck. “She. She’s still waiting. Dad, please.” 

Bruce lifts both hands to cover his face, and hunches over slightly, taking in a deep breath. Or six. 

“Always wear nice and clean underwear,” he mutters. “In case you get in an accident and the doctors and nurses have to see.”

Jason wheezes out a laugh. 

“It’s not _that_ funny,” Bruce says. 

“It kind of is,” Jason gets out between snorts. 

“Tell my mother,” Bruce says, with remarkable poise for someone who has not only had an unfamiliar child drop into his yard and then die three times, but also gotten back a previously dead son he buried days earlier and learned that his own long-dead parents are currently in the room with him, and that said previously dead child can see and speak with them now, apparently, “that in all my years of running around the world, and all the times I’ve been injured as a civilian and as a vigilante, that has _never once_ been actually useful in a single situation ever.”

“She says--” Jason starts laughing again, and it’s the sweetest sound Bruce has ever heard. “She says to tell you herself, you coward. And also your dad says he is feeling both unloved and incredibly left out, and that he deserves at least partial credit for the success of tonight, considering that he _tried_ to tell you guys that Tim was about to crash, and it’s not his fault you didn’t hear him.”

Now Bruce doesn’t have enough time to unpack _all_ of that. 

“Dad,” he says, nearly tearing up again for the second time in as many minutes. _“Dad._ I love you so much. And you, Mom. I love you both so much. I--” And for the first time in known human history, in front of God and his teenage son and his second father and Superman himself, who just slammed into the cave, Batman’s voice cracks. “I _missed you.”_

Jason closes his eyes. 

“I know you can’t feel it, probably,” he says, “but so you know--they’re both--they’re both definitely hugging you right now. They love you too.”

“Bruce,” Clark says, stepping up by the gurneys, eyes wide as saucers as he stares at Bruce holding Jason, warm and pink and alive. “What’s going on?”

“I think,” Bruce says, with immense calm, “that we’ve just experienced a miracle.”

* * *

An hour later, Superman is drifting around the cave in mid-air, on his back, Jason perched happily on his broad chest and talking on the phone to a laughing and sobbing Dick who is currently waiting for a pick up from Alfred because they unanimously agreed he was in no fit state to drive. 

Alfred asked Bruce if he wanted to do rock paper scissors for it. Bruce told Alfred to just take the Bentley. 

So Bruce is watching his youngest son and his oldest friend drift lazily through the air, everyone just enjoying the brief calm before more questions have to be asked, before reality has to hit, before there is pain and probably crying and a whole lot of work to do, and Bruce. Bruce is okay. 

His parents are beside him, he knows. He thinks--maybe--it’s maybe his imagination, trying to run in overdrive with how much he wants it to be real, but maybe he’s starting to be more open to it, or maybe the emotions are so big that the walls are being thinned--he doesn’t know. 

But he thinks that sometimes, for a moment or two, he can feel the brush of cold fingers on his back. His cheek. His forehead, once. Just for a moment. 

“Love you,” he whispers, again, into the air. 

And a piece of spare paper from a previous EKG drifts upwards off the cart and then slowly, back and forth, twisting and curling, down to the ground. 

Bruce smiles.

Then he settles forward, leaning his elbows on the table on either side of Tim’s head while the boy keeps breathing, keeps existing, keeps resting for real, finally. And Bruce brushes one hand over Tim’s messy hair before cupping the boy’s cheeks upside-down in the palms of his own large hands. 

“I don’t know how you did it,” he says, softly, looking down. “And I don’t know why, yet, and I don’t know who you are or how you found him. And I would never, ever, ever want you to do it at the cost of your life. We will definitely be having a talk about that later.”

A pen shifts on the counter, and then shifts again, and Bruce gets the sense that his parents definitely agree. Tim’s got a lot of lectures coming from a lot of people when he wakes up.  
“But,” Bruce goes on, with one more glance up to check on Jason and Clark, and then a soft smile at seeing them tangled in a hug while Jason seems to have drifted off in the middle of the phone call. “You brought my son back to me. Alive. And _well_. I’m sure it’s not perfect--he did die, and miracles don’t just--I’ve lost and regained enough people by now to know that getting someone back doesn’t erase the damage caused by their loss in the first place. But it’s a second chance. And you gave us that.” 

Bruce smooths his thumbs over Tim’s cheekbones. 

“I don’t know you. I don’t know your story,” he murmurs. “But you brought him back to us. And if there’s anything I can do to make it up for you, anything at all, it will be done. Rest, Tim. You’ve more than earned it.” He smiles and stands up from the stool, ready to head over to where Clark is slowly drifting towards the floor, Jason curled in his arms. “We’ll be here when you wake up.”

* * *

There is shouting. There are tears. There is a very confused Jason, for a few moments, when he wakes up to the sound of Dick’s heartfelt shout. And then there are noogies and group hugs and more tears and more blankets than are probably healthy, and Alfred herds them all onto the proper chairs Superman carried down to the med bay while Bruce finally manages to get through to Constantine and extracts a promise from the man to come as fast as he possibly can, barring supernatural road blocks along the way. 

And finally, Alfred starts a full check-up on Jason while they sit, and Jason, bright-eyed and much less shaky than before his impromptu nap, begins to finally tell them what he knows. 

* * *

“Well,” he says, scrunching up his nose while Alfred places a cold stethoscope against his back. “I was dead.” Everyone winces. Jason swallows, but presses on. “I mean, hang on, I’m doing this wrong.” He clears his throat, then stares off into the middle distance and tips up his chin. _“Jason Todd was dead, to begin with,”_ he says, in the voice that’s gotten the play director to cast him in the last four shows and counting. 

“Jason,” Bruce growls, sounding strangled. 

“Sorry,” he says, sounding not very at all. 

“Go on,” Alfred says, moving on to sticking on a good number of electrodes while Jason cooperatively lies flat on the second gurney. 

“Well. Okay. So. I didn’t move on, um--I--” Jason sighs. 

“Had unfinished business?” Dick offers, with a waggle of his eyebrows. 

“I hate you,” Jason says flatly, but shoots him a fond glare rather than an angry one. “Yes. Fine. That works. Anyway, everything was terrible and then it was quiet and then suddenly I was back here at the manor and everyone was gone. Except...Grandma and Grandpa.” 

“Martha,” Alfred murmurs, watching the machine’s readouts intently. “And Thomas. They stayed, too, all these years.”

“Yeah,” Jason agrees. They’ve been--they’ve been busy, actually. They kind of organize the whole region’s ghost population. Help newcomers, check in on people, get everyone sorted, it’s--impressive. But Tim can tell you a lot more about all that. When he wakes up.” 

They all glance over at the other boy still sleeping on the gurney to the side for a moment. 

“Anyway,” Jason says, and clears his throat. “I was. Really confused, which they said was normal, and then I was really fucki--sorry, really freaked out, which they said was also normal, and then I finally calmed down enough to get a grip, and they showed me the ropes. And also started telling way too many baby stories.”

Alfred snorts. He helps Jason sit back up and start peeling off adhesive patches. 

“And then, they--hang on.” Jason twists and looks up and behind Bruce and Dick, brows pinching together. “Where should I start? How much should I actually get into right now? I mean, am I even supposed to know--”

He’s quiet for several long seconds while the others watch, and Alfred continues on unbothered. 

“Okay.” Jason nods. “Yeah, that’s fair.” He looks at Bruce and Clark, and then shrugs with a small smile. “There’s way too much I could talk about if I went in order, and not everything is important, so--I’m supposed to tell you about Tim, really quick, and then what happened tonight.”

“All right,” Bruce says, mildly. “Go ahead.”

“So,” Jason says, holding out one arm without question when he sees Alfred pull out one of the blood draw packs. “Grandma and Grandpa say no one totally knows what’s up with Tim in the ghost community, but Grandma ran into him when he was a little kid and had just figured out that he--I promise we’re not crazy, okay, I know how insane all of this is gonna sound, but--he could bring dead animals back to life by touching them. He was freaked out about it. And then he started being able to see ghosts, too--Grandma was the first one he met. Or at least remembers meeting. And then--hey, do I still get a sticker?”

Alfred actually laughs. “Yes, Master Jason, you may have a sticker.” He turns to rummage through one of the drawers, and Jason cheerfully pulls off a Captain America shield from the roll, then sticks it directly on the center of his forehead. 

He turns to look back at the others in their chairs with a wide grin. 

“Anyway,” he says. 

Dick chokes from trying to avoid laughing. Bruce politely whacks him on the back a few times without comment. 

“So Tim’s been running around Gotham for years, apparently, tailing Batman and Robin. Like, literally. The Grands swear they’ve got more gray hairs from him these past few years, which shouldn’t be possible. I think they’re just being dramatic.” 

The second he says that, an extra large tongue depressor flies out of the holder and whacks Jason on the forehead. 

“All RIGHT,” he grumbles. “SORRY. Fine. I’ll keep the peanut gallery to a minimum. Geez.” Clark is the one who cracks and laughs this time, and Jason shoots him a look without any real heat. “As I was saying. Literally running around Gotham. He talks with a lot of the ghosts and has made a lot of friends. Everyone likes him, almost, except for the ones who no one likes anyway.” Jason goes quiet for a moment, then, and glances back over at where Martha and Thomas must be. “How much do I...how should I explain...okay. All right.”

Jason frowns. “Tim’s...Tim’s not a normal kid, right, we can all see that. But he’s also really, really lonely. His parents are basically never around. He’s our neighbor, B--he’s a Drake. That’s how Martha found him so easily, he’s so close. But they--they leave him alone. All the time. And it’s not just ghosts, out there, there’s--I mean, Constantine knows way more than we do, but there’s stuff, bad stuff, I don’t know. Grandma and Grandpa and the others didn’t actually know what was going on, or what happened, but Tim was always this kind of sad and lonely that even ghost friendships couldn’t really make up for, and something--something must have found him, they think--” Jason cuts off, glancing up for reassurance, then turns to stare at Tim over on the other gurney. 

“Something bad found him,” Jason says, softly. “They told me he just--totally vanished for a few hours. No one could sense him anymore. But there was no body, either, so he hadn’t died and moved on. And then he was back, suddenly, but his--I don’t know how to describe it. I can’t really remember now, with real eyes again, but he sort of--he and a few other people sort of have this weird look, to ghosts, because they’re different--I don’t know. But he was like--tainted. Like he’d been poisoned or something. Grandma and Grandpa found him in his room really, really sick, that night. He never woke up while they were there, so they tried to just keep him cool and watch and wait, and then--he got better, all of a sudden, partway into the morning, and they thought it would be fine, but…”

Jason looks back over and meets Bruce’s eyes. “He woke up the next day and looked straight through them. Straight through everyone who tried to talk to him. No more animals came back to life, either. He kept talking in the fever about making it stop, and then he woke up--normal, basically. And he’s stayed that way ever since.”

Bruce frowns. 

“Well he’s clearly not normal anymore,” he says, gesturing at all of Jason and the room in general. 

“Well, duh,” Jason says, and rolls his eyes. “Clearly.” 

“So what happened.” 

“How should I know?” Jason gestures vaguely up and down his body. “I was dead.”

A second tongue depressor whacks him, and is rapidly followed by one of the EKG papers flying straight into his face. 

“Point taken,” he sighs, pulling the paper down into his lap. “I mean. I’ll tell you what I do know. Grandma has never stopped watching out for him at least once a day, since, I mean, it’s not like anyone else is keeping tabs on Tim. So she told me a lot about him, and how much he used to talk to ghosts, and how he cheered everyone up and even helped a chunk of us--them--find a way to feel...fulfilled, I guess, and move on. And stuff. And how he’d spent years rooting for us and helping in ways we didn’t even realize--shit, Bruce. He’s done a lot. So she wanted me to tell him thank you, and like--get to know him, kinda? Since she feels like he’s her family too?” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. 

“Do you need a break?” Bruce asks, gently, reaching out and placing a hand on his knee.

Jason shakes his head quickly. “No. I want to get this over with. I’ve been hanging around you guys for a while, until the funeral, and it was--listen, I love you, but you were all so sad it was--really depressing. I kept thinking about what happened because you all were, too, and so Martha took me over and told me to stay with Tim for a bit, at home and school, to feel more normal. So I did. And he never saw me. But then--tonight--” Jason takes another breath. “I was. I was really upset, all of a sudden, for Tim, and for myself, because I was like--it really hit me again that I. You know.” He waves a hand, then continues. “And. I talked to him, for the first time, while he was asleep, and it seemed like he actually turned in his sleep to listen, and--I asked him for help. Because I just--he was _there_ , you know? I was desperate and lonely and he was there.”

“It’s not your fault,” Alfred interjects. “Master Jason. What happened to Tim is not your fault.” 

Jason grumbles something under his breath, and then fully-body shivers. 

“Don’t _do_ that!” Jason scoots off the gurney and right onto Bruce’s lap, and burrows in while Bruce’s arms come up to wrap around him. “I appreciate the hug, Grandpa, but I’ve got a body again, that was _really cold.”_

There’s a pause, then Jason smiles a little. “It’s okay, I’m not mad, just--a little warning next time.” He glances around. “Are you good for me to keep going?” 

They all make various noises of agreement. 

“So,” Jason says. “So. So. He. I don’t know, his chest, like, glowed a little, when I said that, and then all of a sudden he like-- _woke up.”_

“Woke up?” Bruce asks. “From sleep?”

“No.” Jason shakes his head. “No, like--like a sleepwalker. I mean _woke up._ Like, the real Tim. It was like some wall got shattered and then, BOOM. Just. Golden glowy different person. He was like the _Sun._ It was bananas. And then--and then he looked at me, with glowy eyes, and squinted, kinda, and then he said, ‘Oh. I can fix this.’ And then he just walked out of his house in his bare feet and headed straight for my grave.” Jason shakes his head again, stares at the wall. “He kept like, trying to reassure me, on our way over, while I was screaming for Grandma and Grandpa to come help, because I didn’t know what was going on, and he just--he ignored us and started digging, and kept going, and then he like...fell back asleep again, kinda, and dimmed out almost. But he never stopped digging, and then he opened my casket and--”

Jason shivers again, and this time he doesn’t have a ghost to blame it on. Bruce squeezes him a little tighter. 

“He reached down, and all three of us grabbed him, just--hoping maybe if we pulled hard enough he’d stop, but he didn’t. And then the next thing I knew,” he says, very quietly now, “I was staring up at the sky and Tim was falling forward like a rag doll, looking like he was the one who belonged six feet below.”

“Equivalent exchange,” a heavily accented voice sighs, from just out of view. All of them but Superman whip around to see John Constantine step up a few feet away, trench coat and rumpled clothes and absolute disaster hair to match his stubble and tired eyes. “Energy has rules. Physics, and all that.”

“I don’t think physics really...includes undoing death, generally?” Dick says. 

Constantine sends him a red-eyed look. “Mate,” he growls. “Physics tangles up with everything. Magic tangles up with physics. It’s one great big yarn knot of problems that exists solely to make my life living hell. Don’t lecture _me_ about _physics_.”

Dick raises his hands in surrender and slumps back in his armchair. 

“Equivalent exchange,” Bruce says, looking sharply between Constantine, slouched against the doorway, and Tim, still and pale on the bed. “You’re saying Tim was exchanging his soul for Jason’s?”

“Of course not,” Constantine snaps. “I didn’t say souls. I said energy, you wanker. Aren’t you supposed to be the smart one in the merry band?”

Bruce practically grinds his teeth, and Alfred, the wonderful old Brit that he is, absolutely says nothing about Constantine’s language. 

“My apologies,” Bruce says, evenly. “Energy, then?” 

“This boy has spent a lot of years leaving his energy around the region, here,” Constantine says. “I sensed it whenever I was here for more than a few hours for whatever reason. Makes sense, if he’s been going about resurrecting things willy-nilly.”

“I wouldn’t exactly say willy-nilly,” Jason cuts in. “Uh, that’s a direct quote from Thomas, by the way. He also says that Tim had no clue how what he was doing worked. He didn’t really control it.”

“Of course he controlled it,” Constantine says over his shoulder, as he steps up to the head of Tim’s gurney, finally, and messily rolls up his coat sleeves. “You don’t have power like that without controlling it. He just didn’t know what the control was.”

They all look at each other, and sort of shrug. 

“Now quiet,” Constantine tells them. “This is going to take a minute. And you two bloody ghosts, stay a few feet back. I can’t work properly if you’re buzzing nearby.”

The room falls silent enough that they can all hear the blood pressure cuff around Tim’s arm quietly inflate and hiss the air out again, while Constantine mutters quietly, passing his hands up and down Tim’s body till he finally holds them in a hover over the boy’s head for over a minute. His brow furrows more and more as they watch, and his muttering increases, and then in a moment, all of a sudden--

Constantine’s face twists into a snarl, something hazy and dark flashes up in a muffled cloud over Tim’s closed eyes, and then there’s a tiny flash of a golden glow from all of the boy’s body at once, and Constantine stumbles back, catching himself with one sweaty hand on the nearest wall. 

They sit in frozen, held-breath silence for a moment, and then Constantine whips around with wild eyes, to stare directly at Bruce. 

“Bloody hell,” he wheezes. “Bloody fuck. Bloody _fucking_ hell. I don’t know who this boy is, or how you found him, or he found you--don’t know, don’t care, doesn’t matter--he’s the real deal, a right proper little magic bloodline offspring, and he’s such a bloody basket case he got taken by a bloody Beldam. Bloody _fuck_.” Constantine sucks in a few deep breaths and straightens, starting to unroll his sleeves and step carefully away from the gurney. 

“You,” he says, jabbing a sharp finger at bruce and glaring. “I don’t care who he is, he’s your responsibility now. I can’t watch a bloody magic minor. He’s been nearly eaten alive once. You keep him safe or this boy’ll do one of two things--he’s gonna kill himself in a trance resurrecting a full grown human, rather than a teenager, and that you won’t be able to bring him back from. Or he’s gonna be a snack for another Beldam, properly this time, instead of just partly--and he’ll not come back from that, either.”

“What,” Bruce says, slowly, clearly, “is a Beldam.”

“Don’t bloody _ask me,”_ Constantine snarls. He scrubs his hands over his bloodshot eyes. “I don’t rightly know. Neither does anyone else. But they prey on children who are sad enough to eat up the promise of a better, fixed world, when that world is made of spiders and darkness and lies.” Constantine jerks a thumb over his shoulder at Tim. “That boy’s magic, whether he knows it or not. He’s strong. And he’s a seven course meal for a lot of nasty things that crawl in the dark and like to snatch up lonely little children and eat them alive. _He’s_ got magic so strong he temporarily magicked himself out of having magic, which, let me tell you, sounds like the bloody dream to me. But that’s broken now. So,” he says, slowly, like speaking to a fool. “Keep. That boy. Safe. Or you’re going to feed something very nasty enough energy to break all the way through to our world, and then I will have to come deal with it, and probably die, and then you’ll all be devastated and grieve me for forty days and nights, I’m sure. Except you won’t, because you’ll be being devoured by the many awful nasties that I keep away with duct tape and magic and a bloody godawful amount of fast-talking. _‘Thank you, Constantine, we love you, Constantine, have a good sleep, Constantine, see you at the next Justice League potluck.’_ ”

Constantine waves a hand and jogs right out of the med bay. 

“I already said your goodbyes for you,” he throws over his shoulder. “Keep the kid safe, bloody feed him more, and for the love of god, don’t call me this late again unless the world is literally falling down around your feet.”

And then Constantine is gone in a flash of light, and the med bay is filled with yet another silence. They all turn to look at Tim, just as a whole jar of tongue depressors tips onto its side and crashes to the floor, and the third spare gurney in the corner of the area shoves into a wall with no one around. 

“Okay,” Jason says, warily, “So that was. Informative. And, uh, can you two please calm down.”

“Mom?” Bruce asks the air, softly. “Dad? Are you okay?”

“Uh,” Jason tells him. “Grandpa just snarled something about a Beldam, and is mad, and Grandma wants you to hold Tim. Like, right now. Apparently.”

Bruce blinks.  
“I,” he says. “Okay.” 

He hauls Jason up and slides off the armchair he’s been sitting in, stepping around Clark and Alfred till he gets to the gurney. Then he frowns. 

“It’s a bit of a tight fit,” he murmurs. Then he leans down and tucks Jason in next to Tim anyway before Jason can protest, and then weasels his way onto the gurney, squished against one of the guard rails, until he’s got both of them wrapped in a hug.

“This is incredibly uncomfortable,” he says, conspiratorially to Dick, as his eldest pops over to the other side of the gurney and immediately starts taking photos. “But also fantastic. We’re having a sleepover all together on my bed when this is over. More or less. Mandatory.”

“Aye aye captain,” Dick says, with a grin. “I’m gonna go eat some breakfast. I’ll be back.”

“Good plan, sunshine,” Bruce says. “See you in a bit.” 

Clark stands up with a smile. “Well,” he says. “It seems like y’all have things under control over here, and I’ve got to go do the morning chores at the farm--the cows are due for milking right about now. Keep me updated, okay? I’ll have my phone on me all day at work, and I’ll let the rest of the League know the good news, if you’d like.”

“I’d rather hold off, for now, if that’s all right.” Bruce looks down at Jason, who’s now already almost dozing again. And Tim. “Just...a little time to process, first, before the whole league knocks down my door trying to come hug Jason.”

“Absolutely fair,” Clark says. “Hang in there. Call me if you need me.” And then he’s off with no sign left of his presence save for a faint breeze shaking the air. 

“We have all had quite a night,” Alfred says, as he drapes Bruce and Jason with a couple more blankets, and tucks Tim’s in ‘round the edges more firmly. “After, I daresay, _quite_ a lot of exhausting days. You ought to sleep for a bit while I get breakfast ready, and then we’ll see how the boys are doing then, hm?”

Bruce hums with his eyes closed before blinking them back open and frowning at Alfred.

“You need sleep too,” he says. “What about you, Alf? This hasn’t been any easier on you than me.”

“My dear boy,” Alfred says. “If you think I haven’t managed much worse exhaustion during your very memorable teenage years, you are quite mistaken. I’m perfectly fine for now. Let me care for you all until I rest later. It will help me more than sleep at this point.”

“All right,” Bruce acquiesces, around the edges of a yawn. “Okay. But you will sleep later. I’ll keep an eye on these two until you’re back.”

“Yes,” Alfred says, flicking off the brightest lights and only leaving the golden ones on. “Quite, Master Bruce. Have a good sleep, my boy.”

Bruce is asleep beside the boys before Alfred makes it to the stairs. And quietly, several minutes after Alfred has left, and after Bruce has dozed off enough to startle awake, two cold hands slowly comb his hair away from his temples, and above them all, above their tranquil moment of rest, the world wakes up and begins to start its day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> check in with yourself, loves. are you thirsty? hungry? need meds? tired? do you need any of those things anyway, even if you don't want them or feel like you do? is there anyone you want to hug? have you said something nice to yourself today?  
> love you. be safe. stay warm.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm gonna get the first chapter finished and posted tonight too, it's mostly written, see you then!!


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